CeBIT 2011 impressions – Part 1 – Introduction and the Games

This past weekend i spent some time at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. Besides the excellent company I had with my colleagues from Denmark I also got to see some cool techy stuff. I did have an ulterior motive though, I confess. Having worked with video games most of my life and having lived with games (starting with the Commodore Amiga) most of my life aswell I wanted to see some cool stuff that fit into this category.

I expected way more revolutionizing technology in the game market since I heard alot about this in the past. This was quite some time though, maybe six years ago, and apparently CeBIT was bigger with games back then. Perhaps due to gaming growing bigger and manufacturers basically organizing their own exhibitions making CeBIT focus more on what it was always about, new technology and industry networking.

What struck me was that Sony and Microsoft only showed stuff that has been available for quite some time, nothing new and exciting, just the stuff you see at the store.

I’m not much of a computer gamer, but there was a huge hall dedicated to this, most of what I saw here remained unimpressive and alot of it was very overexposed. Tron was displayed everywhere, so was Shift 2. Perhaps the coolest thing was theRenn Sports setup from Fanatec who are also making the Porsche steering wheel for the Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC. Quite cool that I was one of the few in Sweden many years ago selling the Fanatec steering wheels (for the Xbox 1) through my company Playtrack.com. A nostalgia trip for me. 🙂

All in all it was a really good experience, I didn’t get my video game needs fulfilled but there was plenty of other stuff to look at. I will post pictures from the rest of the show the coming days. Sorry that they are somewhat blurry, but hey, it’s all I got! Let’s start off with the PC games:

3D was a huge trend at CeBIT, even on laptops.Playseat had some cool stuff beside their steering wheel setups.Steering wheels attached to seats and cabinets where everywhere, this one with Shift 2 (ZWEI!).

A digital ping pong table where you use rackets with motion sensors in them....I'm just kidding, it's an actual ping pong table.

Moving on to the Playstation bus:

The Sony bus, all there was to it...The continuation being Move?It was warm and crowded.Move was heavily promoted and move was probably what I was thinking here... 😉I have no idea what they did here. Glass floor with some really cheesy sea themed accessories and some screens promoting games like Gran Turismo (that's really related! *irony*).Two Sony reps at the back of the bus. A blank screen and some setups demoing Gran Turismo. The screens were really badly calibrated btw, too high brightness and no contrast.

Let’s finish with Microsofts gaming presence. Its green, it’s white and it’s…Kinect. Besides this Microsoft also had a massive focus on cloud services, more on this in the next post.